It seems like, for once, the zombie apocalypse has caught you at a decent time. You're way out in the woods, far from obnoxious crowds and all the chaos of a major city. Out here it's a pleasant vacation - nothing but you, a bunch of weapons, and a car you have to fix. Oh, and dozens upon dozens of bloodthirsty, brain-chomping zombies scratching at your barricade. Still Alive can't go too easy on you, now can it? It all boils down to a shooting game with some time management thrown on top. Aim with the mouse to use a variety of weapons to turn each shambling corpse into a regular corpse. When the horde has died down, you have to allocate your remaining stamina into either searching for weapons, practicing to increase your shooting skill, fixing the barricade or repairing your car. If you can get that car fixed up you're home free. It's not going to happen overnight, however...

Still Alive is going to invite some comparisons to the classic Last Stand series, and it might be found wanting. That's the curse of jumping into a genre that's already seen near-perfection. Still Alive does just fine, however, and if you can take it on its own terms you'll find plenty of fun to be had. You aim in first person, and the subtle adjustments to your shooting stats that come from practice points start to vary the gameplay immensely later on. It's thrilling trying to decide how to spend your precious stamina points each night. Do you need new weapons, or new skills? Or should you just pour everything into the car and hope things don't get too hairy before it's running? Still Alive might not break too much new ground, but it's a fun example of a tried and true formula. If it ain't broke, why fix it?... Unless it's your zombie-proof barricade, in which case yes, it's always going to need some fixing.

6 Comments

Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but the difficulty level of this game seems far too high. Here's the only strategy I found that could survive day 8-9:

Search to 7% to get magnum
Practice to 7% to get increased reload
Search to 18% to get shotgun
Practice to 70% to get increased build, shoot speed, repair, stamina, and headshot damage
Search to 30% to get submachine gun
Practice to 100% to get increased aim

This also requires very precise shooting to pull off. Afterwards, I focused solely on getting new weapons, but was overrun before I could get to the last 2.

Never fix the barricade. You need all of your stamina for other things.

Practice straight through to 70%. It is vital to get the stamina upgrade as early as possible so you can use that upgraded value as many times as possible. Headshot bonus isn't that much further, so might as well. The original weapon is enough to get you through to this point.

Search for weapons straight through to the first automatic. By this point my barricade was down to about 16%, but I never lost any more.

Switch back to practice and stay there through 100% (aim bonus).

Switch back to searching for weapons and stay there through 100%.

Finally start repairing the car. Do that until the end.

It was day 25 or 26 when I finished.

Aim is key, so except for the first gun (and even most of the time with that one) line up the shot before firing. Headshots all the way. Only start blazing if anything gets past the middle of the screen.

Games of this genre typically let you know what your chances are for X, Y, and Z, so that you can make informed decisions.

In this game, everything is deterministic, but also hidden. So you necessarily have to go through failures just to determine the order of upgrades available to you. A randomized schedule would have been better in a game like this that encourages iterated plays, to add to a sense of foreboding and uncertainty.

Otherwise, here are the brass tacks. You're either good with the starter pistol, and that can get you through the first couple of nights doing some sort of upgrading or research, or not, and you can't get anywhere. The first available weapon upgrade, the magnum, is a sidegrade. More damage, tighter aim, but less of a clip. Because there isn't manual reloading, a small clip size isn't just a mild inconvenience but a major tempo problem.

You can say that certain training upgrades help mitigate issues with weapons, and in fact the weapons might be balanced with the training upgrades in mind. However, the training schedule is not useful. I couldn't feel a difference in build after the second upgrade. So yet again, it's either that you can get by with a weapon until you tech far enough into training, or you can't.

I guess I'm writing all of this, trying to work out something, and the end it's pretty simple. You either have the luck or skill to land all the hits early on with the default weapons and survive long enough to get into the game, or you have a fundamental problem with the game, and I don't think it's worth solving.

I took kdausman's advice, and got through to the repair portion of the game. At that point, I realized that the pace of repair was so slow that it would take me about 11-12 days to repair the car. I sat through about 4 or 5 identical days, then got bored.

For a game that ramps up in difficulty so fast, it seems odd for the last third of the game to be generally the same difficulty. Of course, if the difficulty had increased substantially, I couldn't have completed the game - there weren't any upgrades left.

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